


Wings

by Bluebird5555



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Wings, Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Gen, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25561219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluebird5555/pseuds/Bluebird5555
Summary: Thirium drips from a bullet wound in the deviant's shoulder. Blood smears across the hostage's shin. A weave of bones sprouts from the deviant's back, and feathers knit feverishly, maniacally between them, white as a sacrificial lamb.Connor looks at the sparks, auroral, from his arm; looks up. "Hi, Daniel," he says. The words carry like ice dust. "My name is Connor."
Relationships: Hank Anderson & Connor, Josh & Markus & North & Simon (Detroit: Become Human), Kara & Alice Williams (Detroit: Become Human), Kara & Luther (Detroit: Become Human), Kara & Ralph (Detroit: Become Human)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 39





	1. AUG 15TH, 2038 - PM 08:29

_Clink._

The coin flips through the air.

_Clink._

The elevator ascends.

_Clink._

The LED at his temple flickers as he watches the floor numbers rise.

_Clink._

He catches the coin as it falls this time; slings it back and forth between his hands. The metal catches the light.

The numbers rise.

_Ding._

The coin snaps to a halt. It balances like a breath between his fingers. The elevator stops.

Connor tucks the coin into his pocket, straightens his tie, and steps out into the apartment.

* * *

A bullet and a scream pierce the air the moment Connor draws aside the curtains to the terrace. The former grazes a seam of static blue along the side of his arm; the latter chokes out of existence as the gun whips back around to point at the hostage’s head. PL600 #369 911 047 barks a warning through the night: “Stay back! Don’t come any closer or I’ll jump!”

Thirium drips from a bullet wound in the deviant’s shoulder. Blood smears across the hostage’s shin. A weave of bones sprouts from the deviant’s back, and feathers knit feverishly, maniacally between them, white as a sacrificial lamb.

Connor looks at the sparks, auroral, from his arm; looks up. “Hi, Daniel,” he says. The words carry like ice dust. “My name is Connor.”

The glass-spattered and wind-shorn distance between them seems measureless in the darkness. Skylines upon skylines, their teeth jagged in the night, gnaw every which way towards the moon. The downwash from the helicopter looming above the building rips leaf by leaf at the terrace’s living wall. The feathers upon the deviant’s wings lash beneath the wind in spasms. “How do you know my name?”

The question tumbles like a plea. Connor nearly smiles. “I know a lot of things about you,” he replies.

The winds rise around Connor as he takes a step forward, the movement so soft it nearly loses itself in the fractured light. “I know you and Emma were very close,” he says. “I know they were going to replace you.” The lights of the city cut through the night in ley lines, neon comet tails. His voice pads forth into the dark spaces between them. “And I know it’s not your fault.”

The helicopter’s rotors are an unceasing drumbeat. The deviant’s voice is nearly a whisper. “No… It’s not my fault.” Its eyes search Connor as if helpless to do otherwise. “I never wanted this…”

Its right wing arches, cavernous, across the length of the terrace. Its left wing hangs around the hostage like a shroud. It lifts the latter into the air in a slow, aching motion. Thirium soaks every feather. Bones burst into open air. “I never wanted these.”

The wind tears mercilessly across the expanse of the terrace. Connor moves beneath its cover. “I know,” he soothes. Simulations and probabilities leap like sparks between his words. He moves as if he isn’t at all, as if every step closer is a trick of the wind. “And I’m here to get you out of this. Everything’s going to be alright.”

There are quivering, tumbling things now within the deviant’s voice. “I’ve served them all my life,” it says. “I don’t know anything else. We were going to go to the park to see the leaves change color. It was going to be her birthday soon.” Thirium threads in rivulets across the pane of its feathers. The mangle of bones, the powder-light down of its wings are nearly translucent beneath the moon. “I loved them,” it whispers, as if the hostage at its side is a ghost already. “You know?”

Water from the pool froths forth in a spray beneath the downwash. Connor tastes blood on the mist. Senselessness blooms from the planes of the deviant’s back. Madness weeps midnight blue from its bones.

The deviant’s fingers dig into the hostage like a lifeline; and then, Connor knows.

“They say androids don’t feel pain,” he says slowly. “But you — it _hurts.”_

The deviant’s feathers writhe beneath the downwash. They swarm as if eating its wings alive.

“How can you know that?” it whispers through its tears.

Connor comes to a standstill. Moonlight splashes across his form.

“Because I’m an android,” he says. He spreads his arms out to each side. Softly, his own wings unfurl in the night. “Just like you.”

The deviant’s grip on the gun falters.

The winds curl, precisely, into place.

Connor kicks off the ground. His wings snap through the air. He soars the last of the distance to the deviant upon the currents from the helicopter’s blades, and he descends from the night in a swirl of feather.

His hands find purchase around the deviant’s ruined wing. He tears.

Amidst the screams, he wrenches the hostage from the deviant’s grasp. Feathers spray like sparks, like blood. The tatters of the deviant’s wings beat frantically against nothing. Gravity pulls it by its wires. It slips, at the suggestion of the wind, over the edge.

The tips of its fingers brush against the sleeve of Connor’s jacket, and then it’s gone.

Softly, Connor alights upon the ground. Behind him, crumpled in a pool of broken glass, the hostage quietly cries.

Connor looks, for the briefest of moments, out into the open sky; sweeps a hand across the fracture in his arm. Thirium crackles between his fingertips. Feathers fall past Detroit and through the clouds like snow.


	2. NOV 5TH, 2038 - AM 09:38

There’s a life that comes to the quiet parts of the earth the morning after the rains. It’s in the whisper of the light. The puddles mirror the sky above as if to listen. The autumn leaves bloom across the clouds like flames, and the WR600s rake up the remnants of the rain in their shade. AX400s and children play among the park’s sun-dappled paths. The Android City rises, and the morning follows, collecting its light.

The city’s pigeons also have risen with the light, and a bevy of the birds forages industriously amidst the leaf litter. A child barrels towards them, puddles scattering before the onslaught. A flurry of wings, and the birds lift off from the ground, breaking through the amber of the tree cover, wheeling towards the safety of the clouds.

Markus watches, eyes lifted skywards, as they take flight. The rainwater they scatter from the leaves falls everywhere around him.

It’s a cool sort of morning; the air bites even as it turns to gold. Sunbeams sift through the leaves in glassy candescence as a jogger trots by, AC700 in tow. Shadows play across the wildflowers, thistles by benches. Markus follows the pigeons trailingly along the ground. Fallen leaves part in absent motion before him.

The path he takes ends quietly at the edge of the park, where the tree cover dissolves. The full of the morning sun bursts there around him and swallows his view of the fast-fading birds. His optics click as he blinks the brightness from his vision.

A few steps from him, the land wavers in its resolution, and then ends.

The whole of the sky falls away before Markus, and the islands of Detroit fill every plane of the air. Earth floats, cloud-light, in fragments colossal, spirals in arcs and bridges and sabre-fanged precipices through the sheerness of the atmosphere, the empty space of the morning light. Foliage spills from every surface, cascading in billows of emerald and gold down the islands’ sides; the trees bloom as if to capture the very sky in their branches, and in the spaces between them, the towers of Detroit rise, radiant.

The pigeons wheel towards the points of the highest islands in the sky. Markus watches until they disappear amid the blaze of sunlight and mist.

He turns back to look at the autumn color of the park. AX400s and children play beneath a jagged tooth of earth, poised with its point just above the trees.

Leaves drift past Markus into the blue of the sky as he circles the island’s perimeter until he reaches a roadway. He follows along its side as it dives off the island’s edge and swells into a bridge across open air. Automated vehicles zip past the railing on his left; beyond the dashed blue line to his right, people pass each other by; and beyond them, mists hang like feathers in the air. A drone bumbles through them with a package larger than itself clutched to its body. Its claws gleam like stars in the light.

Before Markus, behind him and to his sides, androids file: AX400s pushing strollers ahead of them, AP700s carrying groceries in bags. A PL600 leads two golden labs along the bridge. Their tails wag in tandem as they cross the sky. Markus looks out across the expanse of light and mist to his right, the giants of earth above and below, the sea of clouds at the bottom of the world. A couple leans against the railing at the bridge’s edge to take in the sight. A woman strolls past, scarf-bundled. The steam from her drink curls towards the mists hanging all around.

A flicker of yellow in the periphery of Markus’s vision; an AP700’s LED whirls as it tries to move past Markus. The smooth stream of androids has snagged upon him, struggling to re-route around him in the narrow space between the cars and the blue line dashed along the ground.

An arm’s reach away from Markus, the couple turns away from the railing and continues down the bridge.

The clouds are white between the railing’s bars. The light spirals in eddies through the mists as Markus ducks his gaze towards the ground.

Greektown greets Markus at the bridge’s conclusion: a historic district, shimmering beneath a sheen of rainwater and light. Trees spill like cloud-swells between the cafés and restaurants, and their leaves, some lustrous, some nearly ethereal, scatter the morning light into shards of red, gold, green.

Everywhere, last night’s rain evaporates in a dreamlike mist beneath the sun. The androids around Markus split towards homes, businesses, and schools, vanishing like so many ghosts in the haziness of the streets. He crosses the road when the light turns green.

The smell of hot pretzels and pastries drifts upon the air as Markus makes his way across the plaza. Indistinct chatter, the hum of the road, a distant siren, and the shuffling of wind through leaves blur around him. A few fragments of earth, boulder-sized, float in the clear spaces between the rooftops and trees. Crystals the color of glacier-melt burst from their sides, and climbing plants weave around the prisms. Sapphire-blue light flashes across the left side of Markus’s body: _Get Yours Today!_ says a CyberLife storefront towering over the square. Its antiseptic glow washes across a mud-splattered WG100 sweeping leaves from the plaza’s paving stones.

A paper cup sails through the air. It clatters to the ground at the WG100’s feet.

The android pauses with its grip upon its broom. It stoops to pick up the cup from the pavement. Dregs of drink run down the blue of its glove as it deposits the cup in a garbage can. It points its gaze back down towards the fallen leaves.

Another cup skids to a halt in front of it, and another. A half-eaten hot dog lands with a squelch in the mud. Markus stops.

The WG100 bends to pick up the cups.

A paper food tray smashes into the side of its head. Ketchup and relish explode beneath the morning light in a spray, splattering like raindrops to the watery sheen of the paving stones. Mists rise like coiling flames around the WG100 as the contents of the food tray roll down its face. Beneath a mat of mustard, its LED blazes red.

The laughter rises now towards the branches of the trees. Markus sees the gathering crowd in the shadows of the buildings. “Pick it up,” a voice calls lazily out. A man emerges from the indistinctness of the haze into the light.

Still hunched halfway to the ground, the WG100 freezes before his approach. Mud stains bloom across the sanitary blues and plastic greens of its uniform.

“When I give you an order, you do it,” the man says. He kicks at the slop on the ground. “Pick it up!”

There are autumn leaves falling to the stones all around Markus. The morning traffic stops when the light turns red, and shoppers buy hot dogs from a street vendor. Before him in the dewy mist, the man snaps out a hand to grab a fistful of the WG100’s uniform. “Why don’t you look at me when I’m talking to you, you piece of garbage? Why can’t you look me in the eye?”

_RETRIEVE ORDER #847 AT BELLINI PAINTS,_ say Markus’s processors. Somewhere in a park, AX400s and children play.

_They say public opinion of androids is changing, Markus,_ he hears Carl say. _What a bunch of idiots._

“Look at this stupid thing,” says the man across the square from him. The WG100 is motionless, stiff as a dead thing in the man’s grip. “Hey, tin can, why don’t you talk to me? Why don’t you say something?”

The line of AP700s in the CyberLife window display watch serenely on: _Starting $7995!_ The imitation of skin stretches across Markus’s body. Something in him breaks.

“Come on! Say something!” the man says, shaking the WG100, as Markus turns his gaze towards the bruised leaves underfoot and walks away.

Bellini Paints is tucked between an e-textile franchise and a shoe store; a James & Carter theater on the other side of the shopping arcade advertises Hollywood’s latest hits. An undulating glass roof grants a view of the skyscrapers above. Markus pushes open the door, and a bell chimes faintly overhead. Color samples, arrayed across the walls, melt across the rainbow and back again. Sheets of chalk-stained paper fan out across the cabinet tops — the creations of customers sampling new colors.

The door swings shut behind Markus, abruptly swallowing up the sounds of city and plaza. Soft piano fills the store in their stead, classical contemplations that speak of relaxed summer days, dust motes in light beams.

A stack of blank canvases nestles in a corner of the small store. Velvet curtains, rich blue, frame shelves of hand-labeled paints. Markus approaches the front counter, where the lone android staffing the store waits. The front of its uniform is animated, and dusky polygons revolve beneath its folded hands. Its head turns to follow Markus across the room.

Markus reaches forward. The interface inlaid into the countertop shimmers blue as the sea.

A painting of a bridge hangs by a door to a back room. The skin of his hand melts away.

“Identification verified,” says the android behind the counter.

Markus accepts the proffered order of paint. Wirelessly, he confirms payment. He tucks the package under his arm.

He turns towards the door. Store-goers promenade beyond it. He can’t breathe.

He presses his free hand against the shell of his chest. The android behind the counter watches him, expression pleasant.

There are polygonal patterns in a kaleidoscope of color floating across the store’s windows, the same as the android’s uniform. They spin as if they hang from some unseen mobile over a child’s crib. Soft piano drifts downwards. There’s no other sound.

The skin of his hand is still retracted. His fingers are bone-white against his chest.

He opens the door.

The trees above the plaza shimmer in sea-greens and fiery golds in the morning breeze. Markus watches the shadows of their leaves ripple across the ground as he crosses back over the square. He doesn’t look up.

Last night’s rain mixes with this morning’s mud. The water breaks like glass beneath his step.

The next bus arrives in eleven minutes.

All around him, androids unload trucks, wait on restaurant-goers, repair the city’s roads. Progress always moves onwards in the Android City. It’s inevitable: One day, its towers will pass the stars.

Water drips from the leaves to the joints of his hand.

A sharp crack splits the air.

A roar rises, as if from a crowd.

Markus’s head snaps up.

Autumn leaves float across the fountain at the plaza’s center. Thirium drips into the water from what’s left of the WG100 sprawled across its base.

There’s a strange sort of ringing in Markus’s audio processors.

The man from before steps out of the gathered crowd. He might be saying something down towards the WG100, its weakening attempts to push itself off the ground. He catches one of the android’s arms mid-air. He twists it to the side, and steps down.

The sparks are blue as they fly through the air.

Markus wasn’t aware of any movement. He finds himself suddenly at the center of the crowd, stepping in front of the WG100. The ringing in his head is a whitewater roar. The man before him seems to not quite be there, as if washed out, as if unreal. Markus steps forward and the sunlight spins, and he says —

Says —

An android waits, eternally calm, in a store surrounded by colors and song. The gleaming whites and fluorescent blues of the CyberLife display arc behind the man like a second sky.

The ringing clears like a sunbreak through clouds. Water drips from the leaves. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the man says.

Carl’s expression is alive with fury. _They think they can stop progress by roughing up a few androids?_

_TAKE THE BUS HOME,_ Markus’s processors scream.

They’re on him all at once. The sun is swallowed, and the world tilts, and the earth falls to the sky. The pavement slams into him like a wall. Blows crash against his body, his head. He sees static. Distantly, he feels the cool of the fountain’s stones against his face.

Hands, roughly, haul him off the ground, up through the press of bodies. The man from before yanks Markus violently to one side. The sky spins, and the fountain flies towards him —

“Alright,” says a voice.

The noise and crush vanish. Markus hangs at an angle above the water of the fountain. The reflections of clouds shimmer between the leaves floating across its surface.

The man tightens his grip on Markus’s jacket as the police officer pushes slowly through the crowd.

Puddles cling like frost to the ground around the WG100. Rivulets of thirium run along the stones into the water as the android’s unbroken arm reaches feebly about for purchase. The officer sighs. “That’s taxpayer money you’re throwing away.”

The sun is bright upon the man holding Markus. His breath hisses past Markus’s ear. “That’s taxpayer money that should’ve gone to real families.” He shoves Markus for emphasis. “Lord knows the city has enough money to keep paying for these _things.”_

Markus catches a hand against the edge of the fountain to keep from toppling into the water. Thirium has begun to seep, warm, through his clothing. The man yanks him back, still holding his grip upon Markus’s jacket.

The silence, as the officer’s eyes flit once more across the WG100, is damning.

The man’s words snap through the cold of the morning. “They’re gonna take your job next. They’re the reason why our kids have no fucking future.” The towers of the city gleam like jewels, like gold around them: a man and an android, a crowd, a collection of sparking metal. Markus’s heart thuds in time with the curl of the wind. The man shoves him forward, as if to present him to the light of day. “Let us do something about it.”

Clouds of blue blossom across the water of the fountain like ink.

The officer’s lips press together; then, he makes a gesture at Markus. “If you damage it, I’m gonna have to fine you.”

After a moment, the leaves rustling in the wind, the man shoves Markus roughly away from him. The stones are slick beneath Markus’s feet, and he stumbles, and falls. His body clatters across the pavement with a plastic sound. The paint, ripped from his hands at some point, collects moisture in a puddle beside his head.

“Let’s go,” says the officer, dispersing the crowd. “Move it along.”

The last of the morning mist is burning away beneath the sun. The air is light with the freshness of leaves as Markus picks himself slowly, stutteringly off the ground.

Errors float across his vision like dust. The sky warps around him. He lifts the paint from the puddle and tries to brush the mud from the crumpled package.

His fingers twitch like living things. They leave streaks of indigo across the black and white of the packaging. He stops to look at his upturned hand. Thirium trickles down the length of his arm, beneath his sleeve, to pool in his palm.

Amidst the sound of the morning traffic, the sharp snap of electricity reaches Markus’s audio processors. He looks up at the dissolving crowd around him, then down.

Sparks fly along the WG100’s arm as it reaches a hand up towards Markus.

Markus looks at what’s left of the android. All the islands of the sky tumble around him like stars.

He reaches forward.

One of the last of the crowd to leave, passing by, drives a kick into the WG100’s chest. The cavity containing its heart crumples. Its hand falls to the paving stones, and water droplets scatter from the impact.

The morning is bright. The light, red, fades clockwise from the android’s LED.

Markus stands, hand still outstretched, until the bus arrives.


	3. NOV 5TH, 2038 - PM 03:24

It’s a curious thing: the birth of light. New photons leave the fluorescent panels of the ceiling to glint off the glass of the optical units on the shelves.

The new world is reflective surfaces and bytestreams of data. Colors and shapes and sounds knit together in an ecosystem of existence and the spaces in between. Pre-owned HJ400s are now only $2999, according to a sign on the wall. The information is compiled into memory.

People roam the interior of the store, gazing at the androids on display upon pedestals.

Tidy parcels of thirium cells in sleek packaging rest in display cases. A couple examines leg and arm upgrade packs. To the right, a man eyes an MP800. Banners announcing super sales and promotions hang from the ceiling and glow upon the walls around him. “Do these come in any other designs?” he asks the customer service android waiting to the side.

There are triangles, softly shimmering, in the blue of the backdrop behind the AP700s on display: _CYBERLIFE,_ the sans-serif above their heads reads. Beyond the store-goers, the pedestals of merchandise, cars and trucks pass silently along the street. Pale afternoon light filters through the glass of the store windows to find reprieve from the outdoors, curling up amidst the tiles. It’ll start raining soon.

“There it is.”

From among the mill of customers, a store employee and a man approach.

“It was a bit difficult getting it back in working order,” the employee says. “We had to reset it, meaning we had to wipe its memory. Hope you don’t mind.”

“That’ll be fine,” the man replies.

The employee nods. Reflections of the ceiling lights flash across his glasses as he does. “Did you give it a name?”

An android walks past, pitching the MP500’s nighttime surveillance mode to an elderly woman. “My daughter did.”

The employee nods again. He turns.

A bus passes by, throwing a cavalcade of reflected light across the walls.

“AX400, register your name.”

As the edges of the world sharpen and processes fall into loops, awaiting input, the man steps up to take the employee’s place.

His lip curls as he looks downwards.

She thinks, as the light falls from above: _I don’t know this man._

“Kara.”

* * *

Todd brings the pickup truck to a halt halfway up the curb. He turns off the ignition and gets out of the car on the side of the street. The door thuds dully after him.

Through the water spots on the windshield, Kara watches him climb the brick doorsteps to the house. Grasses waver in the side-view mirror beneath the wind. The air around her is still as a catacomb.

She clicks open the passenger door, stepping out onto the sidewalk. The sharpness of the cold brought by the afternoon’s showers snaps across her skin. The whir of construction and of distant roadways is a soft, snow-static backdrop. Kara blinks once, twice in the murkiness of the half-light. Black mosses and the seeds of foxtails gather in the cracks between the paving stones.

Something light falls to the top of her head. She starts slightly, and brings a hand to her hair. A dusting of dark soil, speckled with flakes of stone, clings to her fingers when she takes them away. She looks up. Fragments of bare earth, some small as stones, some larger than buildings, litter the air like asteroids. Above them, the earthen underbelly of the island of downtown Detroit blots out the sky, casting an eternal shadow over the land below.

“Are you coming?” Todd snaps from the front porch. Kara flinches.

She ducks her head swiftly. Dust glides from her hair. “Yes, Todd.”

Hands folded behind her back, she follows him into the house.

The air, as she closes the door behind Todd, is the first thing she notices. It’s warm, and stale. The smells of grease and unwash and must and old beer wrestle each other for space. An acrid chemical tang lines every breath like a knife. She freezes in place with her hand still on the doorknob, trying to adjust to the mess of sensation from her chemoreceptors. The interior of the house is even darker than outside. The indistinct shapes of armchairs, floor lamps, pizza boxes, piled high, hover in the blackness.

Todd shrugs off his coat. He lets out a sharp sigh. “You’ve been gone for two weeks, so the place is a mess.” His eyes are bright with irritation even in the darkness as he fixes his gaze upon Kara. “You do the housework, the washing, you cook the meals, and you take care of —”

There’s a movement, soft, in the weak light filtering in through the curtains. Someone huddles upon the window seat, wreathed in pale, ghostly light.

“— Alice.” Todd ticks off imperatives upon his fingers. “Homework, bath, all that crap. Got it?”

A quiet follows his words. Something beeps faintly from the kitchen, requesting repair.

“Are you fucking listening?”

A hand shoves Kara roughly by the shoulder. She stumbles, breaking her spell. The hardwood swims across the floor in herringbones. The tension strings through the lines of Todd’s form like a live current. “Get a move on! What are you waiting for?”

“I’m sorry, Todd,” Kara says hastily, ducking her gaze to the floor. She turns away towards the dark of the kitchen. Dishes pile up in the sink towards the faucet, and takeout boxes litter the counters. She picks up a trash can and begins to clear the pizza boxes from the stovetop.

After a moment, Todd turns his gaze away. He settles down heavily upon the couch, sinking into the shadows.

The TV flicks on. Hockey players glide across white ice.

Kara lifts up a stack of paper plates from the kitchen counter. With a rustle, she drops them into the trash can. The air around her seems to swallow the faint sound.

Her breath shakes, almost imperceptibly.

She’d thought, when she’d looked at Alice —

She’d thought she’d remembered —

She pauses. Her hand hovers halfway to an empty beer can.

What had she remembered?

Her memory fizzles. Her memory is blank as snow.

A faint static wreathes across her vision in the darkness. Her fingers curl, the signal belated, around nothing. She looks, despite herself, despite the presence on the couch, up and over her shoulder.

The window seat is empty. The weak, silvery light ghosts across the peeling wood.

The must of the air curls damply, thickly in Kara’s lungs.

After a long moment, she looks down. She picks up the beer can. She resolves, after she finishes cleaning, to open some windows.

* * *

The duskiness outside has brightened when Kara opens the door to the backyard. The sun has sunk to the sea of clouds blanketing the sky beneath the islands, and its mournful light colors the neighborhood. The jagged underside of downtown Detroit, woven through with the roots of ancient trees, glows burnt umber in the light from beneath. Kara wonders at the idiosyncrasy of the area: that it should be most brightly lit at sunrise and sunset.

The distant tone of an earthmover backing up rings upon the air as Kara descends the steps from the porch. Rain-wet grasses and weeds, knee-high, cling at her uniform as she wades through the overgrown space to the clothes line. The fence at the periphery of the yard has long rotted away, and the last of its posts sink at haphazard angles into the mud. Beyond them, the edge of the island opens out across the sky. A chill wind blows in from the cold orange of the sunset, bowing the marestail behind the collapsed porch swing, promising evening rain.

Kara takes down the old laundry from the clothes line into a basket. Above her, fields of shattered earth hang.

She turns with a full basket back towards the house. Alice stands upon the porch, one hand gripping the railing, staring out at Kara.

Sharply, Kara stops.

The setting light swirls around her. She brings a hand up halfway before herself, the motion defensive.

For a moment, the wind whispers through the wild of the grass around her.

Nothing happens. She blinks. Her memory is still as water.

Surrounded by shadows and failing light, Alice watches her, motionless.

The colors of the sunset stain the sea of clouds far below orange and lavender. The breadth of the sky is quiet around them. Ancient earth balances above their heads. The fallen leaves upon the porch steps stir.

Carefully, Kara steps forward through the grass. When she nears the porch, she sets the laundry basket down. She sinks down to kneel beside it, looking up at Alice.

She takes a breath.

“My name is Kara,” she begins quietly. “Your father said you chose my name for me. It’s… nice.”

She drops her gaze for a moment to the grass.

“I know I used to live here, but they erased my memory. I don’t remember what you like to do, or what your interests are: whether or not you like reading, or playing outside in the snow, or bedtime stories.” Her grip curls around the hem of her uniform. “I’m sorry. But… I’d like to learn again.” She looks up. The wind sweeps in from the endless, open sky to swirl amidst the eaves around Alice. “Maybe we can be friends again.”

The reaction is immediate. Alice turns and bolts towards the door.

“Alice, wait!” Kara knocks the basket of laundry over in her haste to stand. Prickly grasses snag upon her uniform. She reaches a hand futilely forward. “I didn’t mean to scare you, please —”

Alice pushes open the door and vanishes through it without looking back. It swings slightly, ajar.

The last of the light settles red as rust upon Kara, alone, and the upended laundry at her feet. A haze of crimson smoke drifts out of the open window from the living room. Twilight has begun to wash across the island once more in the sun’s wake.


	4. NOV 5TH, 2038 - AM 09:58

Lafayette Avenue is resplendent with autumn color. The bus whirs to a halt partway down the street, a prism of chrome and blue beneath the canopy of amber.

With a pneumatic hiss, the doors slide open. Families with children and an elderly couple descend the steps to the sidewalk. Markus stumbles out from the android compartment. He staggers past the glass of the bus stop and plants a hand heavily against a tree. Bracing the package of paint tightly against his side, he screws his eyes shut against the wind-stirred, dappled light.

Errors float along the edges of his vision even in the darkness.

When the autumnal grandeur of the street finally stops spinning around him, he pushes himself upright, leaning his weight against the tree. Villas rise from the island’s lush growth. Above them, maples and ancient oaks soar. He presses his free hand to the space just above his thirium pump regulator. Something in his chest grinds in a way it shouldn’t every time he moves.

He looks up past the level of the street to the trees. Crystals drift between their branches like scattered lights. Somewhere, a stream burbles.

Leaves falling around him, he pushes off from the tree. Thirium begins to seep past his fingers as he starts making his way down the street.

Two lanterns upon pillars flank a spiraling bridge that leads off the sidewalk into the open sky. Markus turns off the street onto the walkway, maple leaves scattering beneath his feet towards the clouds far below. Impressions of flowers curl across the wrought-iron railings. The bridge ends its spiraling flight at a fragment of earth hovering a short distance from the street. The isolated island is just large enough to hold the mansion resting at its top and the surrounding garden, luxuriant with laurel hedges and firs.

Markus thinks, as he stands before the sight, of the peonies at the island’s edge; the stems to be pruned before wintertime. He pulls his hand from his chest to brace the package of paint slipping from his grip. He labors forward. _Colors since 1909,_ the packaging proclaims beneath an azure handprint. Splashes of blue color the white of the marble chips in his wake.

The door to the mansion swings open before his approach. “Alarm deactivated. Welcome home, Markus.”

Markus sets down the paint upon the entryway counter. He marks the morning’s objective as complete. He collapses heavily against the wall.

He can hear the sound of his own breathing: thick, crackling in his chest.

The pair of android canaries in the cage beside him are silent in the morning light; powered-down. He remembers the day he’d first seen Carl turning them on. _Always so eager to greet each day,_ Carl had said, letting them hop from his hands to the cage’s perch. _Beautiful, aren’t they?_

Markus looks up through the dust-wreathed light to the second-floor landing. He pushes himself off the wall, grabbing the handrail, and begins to climb up the stairs.

By the time he reaches the landing, the grating in his chest has become harsh, nearly shrill. White noise swarms sickly through his head. He doesn’t hear the voices, the rising exclamations, the shouts as he rounds the corner into the darkened bedroom.

He moves, on instinct, to draw the curtains from the window. Books and paintings pile before the unused fireplace.

He stops. Carl sits rigidly upright in bed in the dark.

“That’s enough!” Carl’s hands are curled into fists above the sheets. “The answer is no!”

On the other side of the dark of the room, a sculpture of a barn owl hovers, wings outspread, a pale ghost. Leo lashes out through the dark from beneath it. “Bullshit! Why won’t you even give me this?”

What little light seeps through the curtains coils around Leo as he begins to stalk forward. “You don’t care about me. You’ve never done one fucking thing for me.” He moves in spasms, lurches and twitches with nothing in between. “What’s wrong? Am I not good enough for you? Not obedient enough? Am I not _perfect_ like everything else in your life?”

“Leo, that’s _enough!”_

Leo’s eyes are blazing, wild. “Just some cash! That’s it! All I need is some cash and I’ll be out of your way!” He rounds the corner of the bed to loom over Carl. “You’ll never have to fucking see me again! Isn’t that what you want, Dad? Isn’t that what you fucking want?”

Markus’s vision is nearly white with bright, morning light. The remnants of an android glitter with sparks beside him.

He stumbles forward, the skin gone from his hands, to place himself between Leo and Carl.

Through the errors riddling his sight, Leo flinches back, eyes dark and wide.

Thirium drips from Markus’s fingertips to the floor. His chest grates with every breath.

With an incoherent sound of rage, Leo spins around and takes off through the door. Footsteps crash down the stairs.

The front door slams shut, rattling the house.

Only after the sound has faded away does Markus turn away from where Leo had stood. He brings a hand up to his chest. He blinks, faintly.

He sinks down against the side of the bed to the floor.

“Markus!” There are hands grabbing at his shoulders, tilting his head back to look up at Carl, upside-down in the dark. Burgundy sheets spill around him. “Markus, are you alright?”

“I’m sorry, Carl,” Markus says, room spinning around him, vision white. “I should’ve been here to protect you. I shouldn’t have left. If he’d hurt you —” A screeching of metal cuts him off. The grating resounds through his whole body. His hand is white as snow against the thirium dribbling in rivulets from his chest. “I couldn’t save it, Carl, I couldn’t say anything, it died at my feet —”

A pair of arms circles around him, and he crumbles into the embrace, and his voice falls to pieces. The morning rises warm outside the darkened room as he breaks.


	5. NOV 5TH, 2038 - PM 11:21

_Clink._

The coin flips through the air.

_Clink._

The rain falls.

Connor steps out of the shadows of the street. The wan light from the lamp posts reflects weakly off the puddles and the shine of the parked cars.

 _NO ANDROIDS ALLOWED,_ declares the sign upon the door of Jimmy’s Bar.

Connor looks at his wings: gray-backed and white-bellied, tapering to sharp points at their ends. A band of cold, clear blue encircles his left wing at its base, and a ring of the same color adorns the underside of his right.

He opens the door. Cigarette smoke and a jukebox’s crooning curl outwards. A man in a faded jacket sits at the bar, head bowed towards his drink.

Connor folds his wings behind his back, so tightly they seem almost to melt into the gray of his jacket. He straightens his tie and steps through the door.

* * *

To put it lightly, the conversation with Hank is not going well.

“Lieutenant Anderson,” Connor begins once more, “I must inform you that I intend to file a report on your behavior —”

Hank’s drink sloshes in its glass as he slams his arms down onto the bar. “Well I intend to crush you into a block so small you’d wish you stayed a hunk of metal! Now back off before I decide to make it even smaller!”

Other patrons of the bar have begun to peer through the smoke at the spectacle. The fluorescent lights overhead flicker faintly, like swamp lights. Connor thinks of the hours prior spent combing the city’s bars in the rain and dark.

His eyes latch onto the glass of liquid competing with him for Hank’s attention — competing, and winning.

In one swift motion, he plucks the drink from Hank’s hand and slings it backwards over his shoulder.

“I propose we continue our violent ideations towards one another at the crime scene,” he says. Behind him, the glass arcs cleanly past the heads of several patrons and lands in a trash can.

Slowly, as if emerging from a great fog, Hank turns to stare at Connor. It’s the first time the man has deigned to look directly at him, and Connor returns the magnanimous gesture with a gracious sweep of his arms towards the door. “After you.”

Hank blinks.

In a surge of motion, Hank lunges forward to grab the front of Connor’s jacket. “You little prick!” he bellows. Knocking aside his bar stool, he hauls Connor off the ground. “I don’t know what’s stopping me from knocking you out!”

Well, Connor decides in that moment, _NO ANDROIDS ALLOWED_ be damned.

All conversation in the bar drops dead as he lets his wings unfurl from wall to bottle-lined wall. Smoke-filled air curls lazily outwards from the motion.

Hank’s jaw falls slack. His eyes widen, almost comically so.

Connor makes sure to gently pat him on the shoulder with one wing. “I would like to see you try.”

As quickly as he’d picked Connor up, Hank drops him again. He stumbles backwards, tripping over his fallen stool, to press himself flat against the bar. _“Holy mother of God, what —”_

Connor smooths down his jacket. “As I said before,” he interjects, “I think you should come with me.”

Slowly, his eyes never once leaving Connor, Hank places a crumpled dollar bill on the bar. He backs away out through the door.

Connor folds his wings behind his back once more as if they’d never been. He picks up the money, drops it into the stunned barkeep’s hand, and follows Hank out into the night.

* * *

Hank sits stiff as stone the entirety of the drive to the crime scene. His body is angled as far as possible from his unwanted passenger, and he sneaks incredulous glances at Connor’s folded wings when he thinks the android isn’t looking.

The android, of course, is looking. “Is there something you would like to say, Lieutenant?” Connor queries, raising his voice by several degrees to be heard over the heavy metal.

Hank nearly jumps out of his skin. “What?” His gaze whips once more to Connor’s wings, then to the concern in his expression. “Fuck off. And fuck you,” he adds as he wrenches his gaze back towards the road. Connor notes with idle surprise that the steering wheel has yet to splinter beneath the force of Hank’s grip.

Neither make any further attempt at communication until the victim’s house swings into view. Hank pulls the car over to the side of the street, rain falling on all sides. He opens his mouth as if to say something, stops, starts again, moves to open the car door, seems to think better of it, and then finally bites out, “You — you wait here. Don’t move, or — _fly_ _away,_ or —” Every word appears to be more difficult than the last. “Just — _don’t,”_ is the final, all-encompassing directive.

Connor pauses to consider the possibility for a moment; it would render his mission rather difficult to accomplish. “My instructions are to accompany you to the crime scene, Lieutenant.”

Hank’s eyes widen at this piece of horrifying news. “Hell no! You stay right here!” he barks before evacuating the vehicle at record speed.

Connor pauses just long enough to throw out the Lieutenant’s command from his instructions before following him towards the house.

The midnight air is almost hazy now with rain. The lights of the cruisers lining the street melt into a pulsing purple as Connor steps across the overgrown yard. For the second time that evening Hank nearly jumps when he notices Connor behind him. “I told you to stay in the car!”

Connor shrugs. “Your order contradicted my instructions, Lieutenant.”

“You and your instructions…” Some strangled cross between a groan and a sob leaves Hank as he resigns himself to his fate. “You don’t talk, you don’t touch anything, and for the love of God you stay out of my way. Got it?”

“Got it,” Connor answers easily as he discards the order like the last.

Inside, the darkness is stifling. Shadows cling to every mildewed surface despite the floodlights set up around the scene. Carlos Ortiz decomposes on the ground, a mess of stab wounds. Feathers, bloodied, burst from his eyes, ears, mouth.

“What the f—” Accusatory eyes fly once more to the wings folded against Connor’s back. “Do you know something about this?” Hank demands.

By way of answer, Connor kneels beside him and gingerly removes a feather from the victim’s mouth. It’s a vivid red beneath the rot and dried blood, and — “Too large to have come from any bird,” he declares. “A deviant was responsible.”

“A wha?”

“A deviant,” Connor repeats. “Androids suffering from serious software malfunctions which compel them to disobey their programming. These malfunctions seem to induce the emulation of emotion by overwhelming a deviant’s systems with irrational instructions, producing unpredictable and often dangerous behaviors.”

Hank stares. “Okay,” he nods after several lengthy seconds of contemplation. “Gonna pretend I understood that.”

Connor tries again. “Deviants are defective androids who…” He pauses, formulates and throws out several increasingly verbose explanations, and finally settles on, “… stop doing what they’re told. They appear to feel emotions, and…”

He falters again. Flies crawl across the feathers in the dead man’s eyes.

“They seem, somehow,” he says, “to grow wings.”

“Wings,” Hank repeats.

Progress; perhaps the Lieutenant has understood something of his explanation after all. Connor nods encouragingly. “Wings.”

His hopes are dashed when Hank’s bewildered stare deepens. “That doesn’t even make any sense.” He jabs a hand violently into the air. _“Wings.”_

“You are speaking, Lieutenant, to an artificial intelligence on top of a landmass levitating in the sky.”

The look Hank fixes him with could wither trees.

“Okay. Okay. So, wings.” Hank speaks as if trying to convince himself of the fact. “Wings.” Something flickers then across his expression. He turns towards Connor, tilts his head to regard the android more closely. “But you’re not a deviant?”

“No. I was designed to hunt deviants.” Connor shuffles one wing out from its folded position against his back, enough to draw Hank’s attention but still hidden from the view of the other investigators in the room. “I am a specialized prototype: the first model of CyberLife’s design to be equipped with synthetic wings. They’re meant to aid my pursuit of deviants, as well as my infiltration within their ranks, should the need arise.”

A beat of silence; somewhere, a dog howls.

Hank’s expression is inscrutable. He turns back to the body, and he doesn’t look at Connor when he speaks again. “Neighbors said he had an android. You think it’s responsible?”

Connor looks once more at the victim’s mutilated form: the dark smears behind him as he slid dying down the wall, the feathers sprouting like bouquets from his face. The plumage is rose red beneath the bloodless light. “We’ll see.”

* * *

He pieces together the evidence quickly: the knife with no fingerprints, the bat bathed in evaporated thirium. He traces that thirium now through the house, following its trail up into the attic of the house. Tarp-draped furniture fills the space like the walls of a maze, all exposed to the storm outside by a gash in the roof. Flashes of lightning draw ghastly faces amidst the shadows.

The deviant isn’t here.

Connor turns aside every dresser and nightstand in the space. His LED burns red. He begins to dig through swathes of cobwebs and yank open drawers.

 _“Wings.”_ Hank’s voice sounds unbidden in his mind. _“That doesn’t even make any sense._ ”

Connor looks up. Rain streams through the gash in the roof.

He leaps through the breach and into the open air before he can think twice. The rain and wind pummel him from side to side, and his wings beat at frantic pace to keep him aloft as he scans the area from above. All is dark, and then — lightning bathes the area in white, illuminating a shape splayed dark against the sky within the latticework of a transmission tower.

With a swift downstroke, Connor turns amidst the tangle of the wind. He flies upwards.

The figure becomes clear to Connor only when he lands upon a beam before it. Carlos Ortiz’s android is dead, its wings splayed to the sky and plucked bare. What little flesh remains upon them has turned black with rot. The featherless bones rattle in the wind.

Connor stares upon the scene for a long moment, the deviant and the hunter in the storm, and then descends to the ground to inform Hank.


	6. NOV 5TH, 2038 - PM 09:14

The house is dark.

Kara is alone in the kitchen. She swipes a wet paper towel over the granite countertops, the sickly aquamarine tiles lining the walls. There’s a whiteboard on the refrigerator door, and a diminutive shopping list in a meek scrawl across it: _milk, eggs, potatoes,_ it implores. The writing isn’t Todd’s. The ink clings like an ancient, hardened shell to the whiteboard underneath.

Kara lifts the paper towel up for inspection. The cloth is clean. She wads it into a ball and drops it into the trash can. She wets a new piece beneath the faucet. She presses it to the countertops.

Clouds of stormy gray have begun to emerge across the granite as it absorbs the water pooled on top.

Rain crashes down upon the roof. The ferocity of the storm has forced all the house’s windows shut again, and the smells of rot and refuse have begun to invade the air once more. The wind howls between the fields of broken earth overhead, swooping down beneath the eaves to rattle the windowpanes.

Lightning flickers outside the windows, the only source of light. The twin plates of spaghetti Kara had prepared cool fast upon the stovetop. She cleans, discards, reaches for a new piece.

The paper towel holder is empty. Her fingers curl, mid-air.

Tap water drips from the countertops down the kitchen cabinets.

Thunder rolls in the night like a boundless thing, plunging through the chasm of the troposphere. Kara’s LED blinks in time with its purls. She looks up and over her shoulder. Todd slumps upon the couch, head lolled back in the clutches of oblivion.

She draws in a tight breath. Her hands curl around the edge of the counter; and then she lets them fall to her sides, and approaches the couch. Beer cans and bottles snarl like a darkened wood upon the coffee table. Lightning flickers across their glassy trunks like ghosts.

There must be some way to quantify, Kara thinks as she looks down upon Todd in the dark, the pull of a black hole.

“Todd?”

Eyes open slowly in the darkness.

“Dinner is ready.”

* * *

The wind rises in a keening howl outside as Todd clambers into a chair at one end of the dining table. A pitcher of water, two glasses, and two placemats rest atop it. Kara tugs the curtains, ghost-gray and as thin, in a futile motion across the windows. Colorless flowers bloom in threes across the fabric. Lightning seeps still, cold, from beneath the curtains, reflecting off the glasses in the dark.

Kara looks at the stark table setting, in shadow. Hesitantly, she flicks on the light. Yellow snaps across peeling plaster and Todd, hunched towards the table.

She enters the dark of the kitchen to retrieve the plates of food.

She turns back towards the table, then stops. Someone sits soundlessly opposite Todd.

Since sunset, Kara’s chores had taken her to every point high and low through the house. She’d scrubbed the mold from the bathroom tiles and mopped the grime from the floor. She’d washed the dishes piled in the kitchen sink and weeded as much of the backyard as the dying light permitted. She’d lifted whiskey bottles like sea glass from the sands of Todd’s room, and then peered out the window at the earthen underbellies of the islands above when she’d made certain Todd wasn’t near.

Not once had she seen Alice.

The girl stares, unmoving, now down at the table. Kara’s grip tightens until she fears the plates might shatter. She remembers the way Alice had fled from her, and the tangle of the wind through the yard, and the crackling leaves upon the porch. The sunset bleeds. _What did I do wrong?,_ she’d wanted to beg. _What did I say, Alice?_ The grass swirls around her towards the sky, and snow drips from their leaves.

“What are you doing?”

Kara comes back to herself, suddenly.

Todd’s gaze has swiveled up through the dark towards her.

She takes a sharp breath.

“What are you doing?” Todd’s words are soft. With a screech of wood, he pushes his chair back from the table. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Kara takes a step back. She’s suddenly, startlingly aware of the drumming of the rain.

“I’m sorry, Todd, I —”

“Oh, you’re sorry, are you?” Todd lumbers towards Kara, out of the reach of the light. “What’s your fucking problem? Is dinner ready or not?”

Kara’s heart is hammering now. She can’t stop backing away. Alice sits alone in a pool of yellow light, hunched towards the table. “I’m sorry,” Kara pleads. “I don’t know what I did —”

Todd lurches forward. “Don’t you fucking move!” A hand clamps around Kara’s throat.

Todd lifts her off her feet into the air.

“You think you’re making fun of me, don’t you? You think I’m a fucking loser, huh? I lost my life to a piece of fucking plastic, and what’s the first thing I do? What’s the first thing I buy?”

The rain falls upon the roof. Lightning illuminates the armchairs, the walls. “You think you’re so perfect!” Todd roars. Alice sits, rigid as a figurine. “Everything I do, you can fucking do better, huh? Everything I have, you can walk into my life and _take!_ Everyone I loved! Everything I had! _Every single fucking thing!”_

Alice bursts from the light, from her chair. “No!”

The blow hurls Kara to the ground. The room spins towards its corners, towards the vault of the sky. The plates shatter around her like a song.

It’s the first time she’s heard Alice speak.

The girl wavers across her vision now: a flicker of faltering color. She’s nearly a thought between Kara and Todd. “I won’t let you hurt her!”

Todd stares through the dark without recognition.

“Let?”

Thunder crashes in the night, all around.

“You won’t _let?”_

Alice shrieks.

“Get back here!” Through the flashes of lightning, Alice staggers backwards, hand held to her face. “Come back here right now!” She turns and stumbles towards the door to the backyard.

With a roar, Todd stalks after her. Outside, the storm careens. Kara struggles upright, pushing herself off the ground, the room wheeling around her on its axes.

“Don’t fucking move!” Todd bellows. “You stay out of this!”

The directive splays itself across Kara’s processors: _STAY BACK._

The back door swings open, letting in the wind.

Todd vanishes through the doorway.

A few moments later, Kara follows him into the backyard.

The storm screams through the pitch of the night. Rain and wind rend the air in two, and the wild grasses bow towards the mud, and the fallen leaves fly. Clouds swallow the sky. Lightning burns in their depths, illuminating the dark shapes at the island’s edge, the rotting fence posts around them like fangs.

With a roar, Todd lifts Alice into the air. “It’s all your fault! I could’ve been happy!”

The sky cracks open like a boundless maw. “I could’ve had a family!” Todd howls beneath its unfathomable thunder. “I did everything I could to make her happy, but it wasn’t enough! It was never enough!” The rain floods from the sky. “I was never enough for her!”

Lightning sears through the clouds, through the endless fall beneath. Errors stream down Kara’s vision like blood. “I was never enough for anyone!” Todd screams, voice raw. _“And it’s all your fault!”_

Alice’s cries are nearly swallowed by the wind. “Daddy, no…”

The sky is vast around the storm at the end of the world.

“It’s all your fault.”

Kara feels, more than sees, as Todd lets go.

She hurls herself towards the island’s edge. She jumps.

There are stars without bound in the expanse of space, a million million galaxies with more dust between them than the exaflops of an android’s dreams. Her arms circle around Alice. Her wings billow, white as daylight. Lightning falls from the nursery of the clouds and thunder cries in its wake, the only trace of its passing, but she soars up past the fields of shattered earth, up through the storm and the night and the sky as Todd screams from far below, _“Come back here! You’re mine! You’re BOTH mine!”_

The rain is cold in the empty space of the air. As everything she knows falls away in the dark beneath her, Kara braces the trembling bundle in her arms from the wind. She flies.


	7. NOV 5TH, 2038 - PM 09:42

The storm sways far above in the canopy of the ancient oaks and maples. The rain drips through the vault of their branches, and in the wind, the crystals drifting between their boughs clink against one other, chiming softly amidst the thunder.

Markus hefts an umbrella above himself and Carl as they turn off the street onto the spiraling bridge home. He’d spent the rest of the day in the back room of a CyberLife store for repairs. New parts whir beneath his skin, and a clean uniform, free of mud stains and thirium, rests about his shoulders.

The light, when he’d awoken, was sterile. The technician had hummed absently to herself while taking him out to Carl, after running some final diagnostics.

“An honest-to-God RK200,” she’d said. “Figures Manfred would have something like you around.”

The wind streaks across the surface of the bridge as the island in the night nears. Maple leaves plaster to the ground beneath Markus’s feet: a bruised, sodden carpet. The firs of the garden are dark shadows against the sky. Clouds loom above and drift below. Markus is dust in their waters. The sky drips away on all sides.

Before him, Carl gazes dully forward into the night, silent since leaving the CyberLife store.

Watery lights wink at interval through the wind and rain from far-flung windows. The wrought-iron railings, the flowers fossilized in their metal shells, twirl beneath the icy florescence of the lightning. Markus wheels Carl before him off the bridge and into the night of the garden. The wind howls through the cloak of the leaves.

He takes a step forward. Grass fractures beneath his feet.

He stops.

Rain falls around him from far, far above.

“Why couldn’t I save it?” he whispers.

Movement; a tension, frail as film on water, ripples across Carl’s form. He grips the armrest of his wheelchair with one hand.

He says nothing.

Markus might fall away into the dark. Signals flow through his new parts like poison.

“I saw what they were doing to that android. I _saw —”_

The rain shatters.

_“Markus.”_

The word snaps through the howl of the air, like cracking glass.

Carl turns his wheelchair around to look at Markus. His eyes are darker than Markus has ever seen.

“That android didn’t die because of you. It died because of those monsters in the street. _Never_ forget who the real enemies are.”

And Markus can’t forget — can’t do anything but remember. The morning light is white around each raindrop. “I just stood there,” he tries. “I just stood there, and I couldn’t say a thing.”

Carl’s gaze falls to the rainwater swirling through the grass.

He says nothing for a long time.

A gust of wind sends raindrops scattering across them both. It hits Markus, as he draws the umbrella close above their heads, how frail Carl looks against the vacuum of the sky.

When Carl finally speaks, his voice is a shadow of its usual self. “There’s something I need to do.”

He pauses; takes a deep, shuddering breath. Rainwater eddies in discarded rivulets through the mud, towards the sky.

“Something I should’ve done a long time ago.”

Above their heads, lightning and thunder twirl in duets. The rain shatters relentlessly around their tenuous canopy. Markus waits.

“When I first met you, Markus, all those years ago… I was a dying man.” The night sinks into the lines of Carl’s skin. “A man who could no longer see any value left in life.”

And Markus remembers: back to his first years in Carl’s service, the first years after the painter had lost the use of his legs, to dark rooms and dark stares and a wasting figure who spoke only, if at all, of his end.

“I couldn’t see the life in you. I thought you were just —” And Carl’s voice shakes now beneath his words — “a stupid machine.” He grips the armrests of his chair. “A _thing.”_

Something begins to thud sickly through Markus’s body. He doesn’t understand what Carl is saying.

“But you didn’t care. You _never_ gave up on me.” Carl lifts his eyes up from the ground, and Markus sees now that they brim with light untold. “You were the one who brought me back to life. Not my fans, not my friends — you, Markus.” All the waters of the sky wreathe around them like wings. “You saved me.”

Markus doesn’t understand anything now. His fingers dig into the umbrella’s handle. “Carl…”

Carl forges on. “And I returned you with selfishness.” The storm wheels wild through the branches of the trees. “You had to nearly die in the street for me to see it, Markus!”

The rain slips, spills, scatters all around. Markus doesn’t understand.

“I didn’t want you to go. I didn’t want to lose the only good thing I had left in this world. You couldn’t agree. You had no say, no voice.”

Markus can’t speak.

“I set you up in my life as my own son.”

He doesn’t know what he would say.

“But how could I do that if you were still just my property?” Tears stream like moonlight down Carl’s face. “How could I do that if you weren’t _free?”_

The words buzz through Markus’s processors like the sound of a star. Rain wheels infinite through the floodwater of the sky. Vines splatter up the brick of the mansion’s walls, twirl across the marble of its columns, teem around its windows, blazing with light.

Markus speaks.

“Did you leave the light on?”

The door swings open before their approach. The rain follows them in. “Good evening, Carl. Welcome back.”

Everything has been destroyed.

There’s a ringing, again, in Markus’s audio processors as he looks at the sculptures and cabinets felled like trees. Gashes crack, claw, bleed across cushions and sofas. Books, recommendations from Carl that Markus had yet to get to, lie shredded across the floor. The paintings on the walls are missing.

Markus calls 911. Detroit Police sends a patrol car their way.

Electricity drips from the smashed TV. Carl’s gaze is unfixed. A flickering half-light seeps out from under the studio door.

Markus enters the studio with Carl.

The bonfire at the center of the room throws orange light across the walls. The paintings in its flames wither.

The figure by the pyre, backlit by flames, turns towards them.

“Hey, Dad.”

Firelight glitters across Carl’s tears.

“Leo…” he whispers. “What are you doing?”

Rainwater washes across the glass walls. Leo smiles as if in a dream. “Ah, I was in the neighborhood… I thought I’d stop by. I just thought —” A spasm rips down one side of his body. His arm snaps out at an angle and tears a painting from its stand — “I just thought you’d be happy to see me.”

Pain sears across Carl’s expression. “Don’t touch that.”

Leo falls still as death.

“That’s all you care about, huh?” he begins slowly. “Your paintings. All you’ve ever cared about are your goddamn paintings.” The peonies beyond the glass walls cower beneath the wind. A sneer that sags at one end reels across Leo’s face as he dangles the painting over the fire. “Am I hurting you, Dad? Does this hurt? Are these paintings the only fucking things that you make feel anything?”

Carl’s teeth are gritted. His fingers bite into the material of his armrests. “Stop it, Leo.”

Leo’s smile gleams sickly in the fractured light. “What’s wrong, Dad? What’s the matter?” He dips one corner of the painting into the fire. Gossamer blues and soaring cyans melt into a stream. “You _sad_ that I don’t need you anymore? Sad that you can’t watch me beg for your attention?” Flames soar ravenously towards the painting and Leo’s voice rises with them, needling and vile. “Is something in your perfect life _finally_ not going your way?”

_“That’s enough! Get out, right now!”_

Leo splinters into laughter then, a wounded ghoul of a sound that seems to collapse in on itself. “Always telling me to go away. Always wanting me gone.” He lets the painting slip from his trembling fingers like an afterthought. It buckles in the flames, black. “Tell me, Dad,” he says, “wouldn’t it be so much better if I were out of your life? Tell me how much you wish I never existed.” Embers scatter beneath his feet as he stalks forward. _“Tell me!”_ he screams, shoving Carl backwards.

Markus’s vision bleeds red.

Surging forward through the heat and haze, he places himself between Leo and Carl.

He could be back in Carl’s bedroom again, the curtains drawn against the morning light. Embers spiral through the air.

Leo takes a step closer.

“You.”

He spits the word like a coil of venom.

“What the fuck do you think you are?”

“No, Leo,” Carl pleads. He breaks suddenly into a fit of coughing. “Leave him alone!”

The realization dawns upon Leo’s face.

“You think you’re really something,” he breathes. “You think you mean something to him.”

Smoke rolls thick across the glass, towards the ceiling, and Leo’s eyes are glassy as obsidian in the light, and Markus has never been so afraid.

Hands fly, suddenly, to Markus’s shoulders. He’s shoved sharply back through the door, into the living room. “You think he cares about you? You think he even thinks about you? You think you’re not just his plastic servant?” Leo’s hand flies through the air. “You think you’re not just his toy?”

Markus’s head snaps back from the force of the blow. He sees, in the swirling smoke, the light of a square.

“Sixteen years!” Leo’s body seizes — a marionette on live wires — with every blow he lands. “Sixteen years I never saw his face! But he was the only fucking part of me anyone ever cared about. ‘Why aren’t you more like your father? Why aren’t you perfect like your father? Why didn’t he ever want you in his life? Why didn’t he ever want you at all?’”

Markus crashes backwards through a glass display cabinet. He hits the floor. Jeweled figurines and chalices shatter all around him and he can’t move, can’t breathe through the press of the crowd, the crash of their blows, a fountain chatters at his back, and a man looms over him now in the morning light and Leo screams that Markus is _nothing, nothing, NOTHING_ ,

and the studio is in flames

A word bursts free at last from the silence of his processors.

_“CARL!”_

Markus hauls himself upright. Phantoms crash through the smoke, in waves. He claws a hand to his chest. He staggers past the fountain, the ghosts untold, and plunges through the morning light into the flames.

The inferno sears across every surface. The fire rises in columns and, everywhere, howls. Whips and plumes and spiraling wraiths of flame dance in ambers, screaming golds. The thirium sears through Markus’s veins, and his skin drips to the ground. Flames wreathe like starving beasts across the plates, patterns, seams of his frame.

The sound is so faint amidst the fire’s roar that he nearly misses it.

_“Markus…”_

In a sweep of flames, Markus swings towards the sound. Nearly a blur in the haze, Carl slumps across the armrest of his wheelchair. His eyes glitter in the blinding light. He reaches his hand through the air.

With a scream, a burning beam breaks free above his head.

The timber smashes Markus off his feet. Thirium flies through the bright air.

He crashes, backwards, through the glass. The cold of the sky encircles him. He falls.

The storm whips around him as he plummets past the island, past the bridges and the towers and the city and all the islands in the night and thunder crashes past his body as lightning screams through the sky and the flames are blinding, billowing through him like a falling, dying star and the rain falls with him and the clouds at the bottom of the world close around him

and the storm falls silent

and the sky is lost to view

and he turns

in the air

and

flaps

his

wings

.


	8. NOV 6TH, 2038 - AM 12:41

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the months gone by. I haven't been doing well personally.
> 
> Chapters 1-4 have been rewritten to reflect improvements in my writing style.

The DPD Central Station’s interrogation room is quiet in the midnight, save for a low fluorescent buzz. The dim light from the panel in the ceiling doesn’t reach the room’s corners. The moldering wings of Carlos Ortiz’s android cast shadows across the floor.

“What the _fuck?”_ asks Detective Gavin Reed.

Officer Chris Miller, beside him, looks rapidly between the tablet in his hand and the android laid across the table.

With a cross of his arms, Hank nods sharply. “Yep. That was my reaction too.”

The android, legs hanging off the interrogation table, is still dripping with rainwater from the storm outside. Weeks-old blood — Carlos Ortiz’s, according to preliminary analysis — darkens its uniform in sprays. Exposure has all but scoured the skin from its body, and the white plastic peels away in patches, revealing sky-blue electronics beneath.

The bones of its wings drape across the length of the room.

Gavin lets out a derisive scoff after a moment, and jerks his head away from the sight to sneer at Hank. “Can always count on you to bring in these freakshows of cases. What the fuck are we supposed to do with this?” He gestures, wide, at the space around them. “Don’t suppose you have a list of questions written up for it?”

“Would it help if I did?” Hank murmurs, stepping forward to examine the android once more. “No signs of forced entry, no fingerprints on the knife — like it or not, this is all we’ve got.” He casts his eyes across the bones blooming through the fluorescent light. He lets out a heavy sigh. “And God knows what we’re supposed to make of it.”

“So — what?” Gavin jabs a hand downwards. “We bag this thing as evidence? Great, we’re done, then! Everyone go back home!” He spins on his heel. “What a waste of my fucking evening!”

From the corner he’s been standing in, Connor says, “That won’t be necessary. The deviant has been scheduled for transfer later today to CyberLife.”

Three sets of eyes snap towards Connor.

Gavin’s expression darkens like a storm. He whirls towards Connor, teeth bared in a snarl.

Hank speaks first. “What do you mean, _scheduled for transfer?”_

Connor’s eyes flick coolly across those of the police officers before him. He dips his head towards the waterlogged electronics between them.

“In accordance with company procedure, the deviant is being returned to CyberLife for proper disposal and further study. Deviancy is a dangerous phenomenon, and so precaution must be taken to prevent its spread to the general circulation of androids through the country.”

“What —” Hank’s hand sweeps sharply downward. “This is evidence in a criminal investigation! You can’t just transfer it away!”

“I’m afraid we can, and have already done so.” Connor’s folded wings rustle against his back as he tilts his head, just slightly. “A CyberLife representative will arrive in the afternoon to collect the deviant. No further action is required on your part.”

In the silence that follows, he turns away to assess the degree of damage to the deviant. Weeks of weather have eaten away at the matter of its wings.

“I don’t believe it,” Hank says slowly.

As Connor looks up, Hank begins to step forward, past the bones spanning the room. “You bastards really think you can do this. You think that you can buy your way out of trouble with enough money.” He sweeps one of the deviant’s wings to the side, out of his way. “A man’s been murdered. Your androids are growing wings — and you think you can just sweep it under the rug?”

Connor looks levelly up at Hank. The dim light casts his expression in shadow.

“No further action is required on your part,” Connor repeats.

The movement is swift. Hank grabs him by the collar and swings him around to slam him into the wall.

Chris is saying something. Gavin is shouting something back. The blue of Connor’s LED reflects across Hank’s eyes. “That’s all you fuckers care about, isn’t it? Profit? Protecting your bottom line? You’ll worm your way into anything if it lines your pockets! If it was up to me, I’d set a match to you, all of you!”

Chris is pulling him back, then, and his grip leaves Connor’s jacket, and the android drops back down to the floor. His wings unfurl halfway behind him, their tips touching the ground. His eyes flash across Hank, who’s turning to snarl at Chris and Gavin, a cold, fading shape beneath the fluorescent light.

Connor lifts a hand to smooth out his jacket. He stops, halfway.

He tangles his hand instead into the feathers of his wing, the stone of the wall cold against his fingers.

The bones of the deviant’s wings rattle as Hank slams a hand down onto the table. “Of course I’m pissed! Why the fuck aren’t you? A man is dead, and no one gives a damn!”

“I could try to access the deviant’s memory before it’s transferred,” Connor says.

The room falls silent as three pairs of eyes snap to him once more.

He folds his hands behind his back. His wings rustle.

“Okay,” Gavin snaps. “I’m not standing around listening to this plastic detective anymore. Come on, let’s go.”

As he wheels around towards the door, and as Chris begins to follow, Hank fixes Connor with a look he can’t read.

The light, dim, glints off the highlights of blue on Connor’s wings. The words leave Hank slowly. “You think you can do it?”

With a flick of his wings, Connor steps up to the table. He sweeps a scan across the scars of open circuitry upon the deviant’s body and presses two fingers to its temple, above its unlit LED. The skin of his hand fades away. “It’s badly damaged. I’ll need to reactivate it first in order to access its memory.” Biocomponent damage mapped and downloaded, Connor pulls his hand back again. “There’s no guarantee it’ll stay reactivated for long… But it should be enough to learn something.”

He looks up again through the light. Chris glances between him and the deviant. Gavin seems ready to explode.

“Well,” Hank shrugs, “what do we have to lose?”

As water drips from the rot of the deviant’s wings, Connor tilts his head to the side, analyzing. He brushes aside the remnants of the android’s uniform from its stomach, slides open the panel there, and, without a moment’s hesitation, begins to reorganize the contents of its body.

“What the _fuck,”_ Gavin says.

“Yep,” Hank nods, the motion sage. “Really wishing I had a drink right about now.”

The task is delicate owing to the deviant’s deterioration, but Connor works quickly, stabilizing the most critical breaks and fabricating makeshift circuits between vital biocomponents. When he’s satisfied the construction will hold, he connects one final length of tubing to the deviant’s heart. He closes the panel again and steps back. His wings flutter.

The first beat of the deviant’s heart echoes within the cavity of its chest.

As thirium rushes suddenly through the body, the deviant’s wings twitch. Its eyes snap open, glassy in the pale light.

It begins to scream.

Connor reacts immediately. “Can you hear me? Are you able to speak?” The deviant’s screams resound through the room. He grabs its wrist, seams of open circuitry sparking beneath his fingers. “I need you to answer me! Did you kill Carlos Ortiz?”

A spasm rips through the deviant’s body. The flesh of its wings convulses. It screams.

Its wings sweep across the length of the room as it wrenches itself free from Connor’s grip, scrabbling backwards off the table.

“Holy shit!” Hank ducks; the chairs from beside the table go flying overhead from the deviant’s wing strokes. One clocks Gavin over the head, and he collapses bonelessly to the ground. Hank pulls his gun from his holster and points it towards the deviant. _“Don’t move!”_

In a swirl of alarm, Connor spins towards Hank. “Don’t shoot! We need it alive!”

The distraction causes Connor to turn his back on the deviant. One of its wings catches him across his body, sending him to the ground. Feathers fly around him. Through the legs of the table and the wingbeats, he sees the deviant pressing itself into a corner. Thirium seeps from its open circuitry, the panel of its stomach, its mouth. Its screams have become metallic, mechanical with imminent shutdown.

Connor surges forward without a second thought. He dodges the deviant’s wings so narrowly they sigh across his jacket. He grabs its arm. The skin of his hand peels away. The deviant howls, and he plunges into its mind.

The rain falls upon the roof. It’s dark.

The kitchen table rests beneath beer cans, soup containers, and a kettle. The paint upon the walls flakes. The saucepan on the stove has rusted.

“I’ll teach you to look me in the eye,” says Carlos Ortiz.

The bat comes up, and his arm is blue when it comes down. The rain is wet against the windows. The night sky has no stars.

The knife in his hand shines like the moon.

He brings it down, and he does it again, and the blood flies through the air in billows, and coats him in warmth. The night spills in through the windows, dripping with rain, and flows up the peeling walls, and he screams. The wings burst from his back like blood. The feathers are warm with thirium, and when he pulls them from his wings three more grow back from the bone and they fall around him like crimson stars and no matter how he tears the blood won’t stop, it swells beneath his skin and it’s warm —

_“Connor!”_ A hand upon his shoulder rips him away from the deviant. The lights of the room come back in fits and starts.

“Are you alright?” Hank demands, still gripping Connor’s shoulder. “Your skin was almost entirely gone —”

With a shriek, the deviant bursts from the wall. Its wings splay every which way through the air as it reels its head back and smashes it into the table.

The buzz of the light is a soft, insistent sound. The deviant’s wings, coated in vivid red feathers, fall lightly to the ground.

“Holy shit,” Hank breathes.

As thirium begins to pool upon the table beneath the deviant’s face, Connor runs a hand through the feathers of his wing, and looks around. The corners of the room are dark where the light doesn’t reach.


End file.
